Meena Alexander

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Alexander wrote poetry, prose, and scholarly works in English. Ranjit Hoskote said of her poetry, "Her language drew as much on English as it did on Hindi and Malayalam – I always heard, in her poems, patterns of breath that seemed to come from sources in Gangetic India, where she spent part of her childhood, and her ancestral Malabar." Alexander spoke Malayalam fluently, but her ability to read and write in Malayalam was limited. She also spoke French, Sudanese Arabic and Hindi. While she lived in Khartoum, she had been taught to speak and write British English; in 2006, she told Ruth Maxey, "When I came to America, I found the language amazingly liberating. It was very exciting for me to hear American English, not that I can speak it well, but I think in it." In her 1992 essay, "Is there an Asian American Aesthetic?", she wrote of an "aesthetic of dislocation" as one aspect of the aesthetic, and "the other is that we have all come under the sign of America. [...] Here we are part of a minority, and the vision of being 'unselved' comes into our consciousness. It is from this consciousness that I create my work of art."

After moving to New York, Alexander was an assistant professor at Fordham University from 1980 until 1987, when she became an assistant professor in the English Department at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). She became an associate professor in 1989, and a professor in 1992. Beginning in 1990, she also became a lecturer in writing at Columbia University. She was appointed Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College in 1999.

Some of her best known poetry collections include Illiterate Heart (2002). She also wrote the collection Raw Silk (2004), which includes a set of poems that relate to the September 11 attacks and the time afterwards. In her 1986 collection House of a Thousand Doors: Poems and Prose Pieces, she republished several poems from her early works and her 1980 collection Stone Roots, as well as work previously published in journals in addition to new material. Alexander wrote two further books with poetry and prose: The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience published in 1999, and Poetics of Dislocation published in 2009.

Alexander also published two novels, Nampally Road (1991), which was a Village Voice Literary Supplement Editor's Choice in 1991, and Manhattan Music (1997), as well as two academic studies: The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism (1979), based on her dissertation, and Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (1989). In 1993, Alexander published her autobiographical memoir, Fault Lines, and published an expanded second edition in 2003, with new material that addressed her previously-suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse by her maternal grandfather and her reflections on the September 11 attacks. She also edited Indian Love Poems (2005) and Name Me A Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing (2018). Some of her poetry was adapted into music, including her poems "Impossible Grace" and "Acqua Alta". Her work was the subject of critical analysis in the book Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander, edited by Lopamudra Basu and Cynthia Leenerts and published in 2009.

Alexander read her poetry and spoke at a variety of literary forums, including Poetry International (London), Struga Poetry Evenings, Poetry Africa, Calabash Festival, Harbor Front Festival, and Sahitya Akademi. In 2013, she addressed the Yale Political Union, in a speech titled, "What Use Is Poetry?", which was later published in slightly revised form in World Literature Today. In 1998 she was a Member of the Jury for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She served as an Elector, American Poets' Corner, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York.

She died in New York on 21 November 2018, at the age of 67, and according to her husband, the cause was endometrial serous cancer. In 2020, her poetry collection In Praise of Fragments was published, which includes some work previously published in journals or staged as performances, as well as new material.

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